Metadata
- URL:: https://review.firstround.com/stop-overcomplicating-it-the-simple-guidebook-to-upping-your-management-game
- Published Date:: 2022-06-21
Highlights
Mostly the opinions of Russ Laraway.
There’s one common ingredient across every type of manager: You’re leading people. So the core of what makes for good management can’t be all that different, whether you’re leading a team of baristas or engineers.
“Direction-setting anchors the team to an aligned result through the combination of two long-term elements (purpose and vision), and two short-term elements (OKRs and ruthless prioritization),” he says. “Each element cascades to the next — purpose leads to vision which leads to OKRs, which leads to priorities.”
“When determining your team’s goals for the quarter, a big part of your job as manager is to gather their input. After all, it’s their team too.
During these meetings, ask each team member to articulate their three priorities — and be really strict about sticking to three.
just saying, ‘Can I have some feedback?’ is not going to cut it,” he says. Try these questions instead:
what moves the needle on employee engagement? “It’s the manager, more than any other factor — there’s not even a close second place,” says Laraway. As Gallup found, managers account for at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores across teams and departments. In other words, managers are holding the keys.
according to Laraway’s research, there’s one single factor that most directly correlates to employee attrition: Whether or not folks believe their manager cares about them as human beings, not just worker bees.
I’ve found that folks are too focused on finding really complicated, cool leadership-y things for their unique environment, instead of just focusing on the stuff that works pretty much everywhere,” says Laraway.
Nobody ever applies for a job called ‘leader.’ The job is usually called ‘manager.’ (…) We focus on the esoteric, complex ideas that make us a “leader” rather than the specific things managers must do well.
We have to restore dignity to the office of the manager. (…) We’ve allowed ourselves to fall victim to this idea of grandiosity — that leadership is better than management.
folks tend to overweight the value of charisma